Over the past few years, confusion has developed among some in the conservative movement who have allowed a legitimate concern over border security to become conflated with anti-immigration politics. As this confusion threatens to saddle the Republican Party with a platform that would be both detrimental to the nation and catastrophic to conservatism’s political prospects, it is imperative, at this point, that we step back and consider, on the basis of first principles, what a proper immigration policy should be.

It should be clear that the bedrock foundation of any rational immigration policy should be to seek the benefit of America, rather than that of potential or existing immigrants, or any other particular group either supportive or antagonistic to them. That said, let us consider the effect of immigration upon our economic well-being.

In any economy, the entire population is supported by the part of it that is of working age. Therefore, it behooves any society to seek to maximize the ratio of working-age citizens to the total. Other things being equal, it follows that the most attractive acquisition a society can make is a young adult, whose childhood and education have already been paid for, but whose entire working life still lies ahead. Of course, all other things are not equal. Those with more skills are greater prizes, as they cost more to create and are likely to be more productive in life. This being the case, it is absurd to deny young foreigners who graduate American universities a path to citizenship.

This logic remains valid, albeit with less clarity, for young adults of a lesser eminence but still, on-net, above-average prospects, including but not limited to those in the military or college-accepted high school graduates who would be enfranchised by the DREAM act.

This being the fundamental economic reality, the primary counter argument that has been mustered against it has been that of labor protectionism. Thus, for example, in a recent PJ Media article attacking Mitt Romney’s proposal to guarantee a green card to every foreigner who earns a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) degree in the United States, Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, writes:

As for stapling the green card to the STEM diploma, this is little more than a marketing tool for U.S. universities to attract more foreign students into paying for degrees in fields that are already saturated. There is no shortage of STEM professionals in the United States; on the contrary, the census shows that there are 1.8 million American engineers who are unemployed or working in other professions.

Setting aside criticism of its questionable statistic (the total number of U.S. unemployed is 13 million), the illogic of this argument is astonishing. Where, pray tell, does Ms. Vaughan imagine that jobs come from? Are they a fixed resource with only so many to go around? Then, is it the case that there were 150 million jobs available here when the pilgrims landed and they have now been filled up? Are the present high American unemployment rates actually being caused by overpopulation? If so, why then were unemployment rates three times as high in 1932, when the U.S. workforce was 1/3 its present size?

No, jobs are not a resource that exists separately from people, jobs are created by people. Immigrants are notoriously entrepreneurial, and the statistics back up the stereotype. While immigrants comprise 13 percent of the American population, they own 18 percent of small businesses and, according a recent study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, were responsible for 30 percent of the growth of U.S. small businesses over the past two decades.

So immigrants as a whole are net job creators. But of all immigrants, STEM graduates are by far the most promising because their advanced training allows them to create not only small businesses, but large ones, including such recent examples as Intel, SpaceX, Google, eBay, Nvidia, and Yahoo. The nation is indeed suffering from a shortage of such people.

Furthermore, the idea that by excluding immigrant talent from the U.S. workforce we can prevent it from competing with Americans is risible. Rather, by excluding skilled or educated foreigners, we guarantee that they will compete with American workers and businesses from their home countries, which will pay them less or allow them to hire local labor at lower than U.S. pay scales. As a result, the jobs, industrial capabilities, and tax revenue that they could have created here will be created over there instead, while America’s position in the world market will be further eroded. To cap it all, by giving up the effort to compete for such talent without a fight, we effectively build a Berlin Wall for the benefit of our foreign competition, allowing them to retain skilled people without making the concessions to both liberty and living standards that would otherwise be forced upon them.

Vaughan objects to American universities financing themselves by charging out-of-state tuition to foreign students. But what’s not to like? Foreign students that come to the U.S. and pay triple the tuition of their American counterparts provide a major subsidy to our educational system. Each such person effectively pays not only for his own college education, but that of two Americans as well. If we were to add the incentive of a green card to the degree, the numbers of such people would expand considerably and make university education much more affordable for Americans.

And education is not the only area where Americans could reap enormous savings by rejecting the arguments of the labor protectionists. Another is health care. Because of the limited numbers of American medical school graduates, many specialist doctors are currently taking home salaries above $400,000 per year. That may be nice for them, but it imposes excessive medical care costs on everyone else, and because these costs are typically passed on via health insurance to employers, it is making American industry less competitive internationally, and thereby contributing to unemployment.

Furthermore, because such specialist salaries are so high, they are having the effect of depleting the number of doctors involved in primary care, and thereby stripping parts of the nation — whether covered with insurance or not — of their access to timely medical assistance. These problems could be readily solved by opening our doors to foreign medical talent.

It is odd that the anti-immigrant’s labor-protectionist argument has been allowed to pass with so little challenge, as it obviously contradicts every well-proven principle of free-enterprise economics. Nor do immigration-restriction politics have a valid basis in any other legitimate source of American conservative philosophy. Quite the contrary, since the first Thanksgiving, America’s tradition has been to welcome immigrants, and it was only with the advent of the progressive movement in the early twentieth century that a significant faction of educated opinion aligned itself otherwise.

Embracing eugenics, environmentalism, and Malthusian ideology and suffering from delusions of grandeur as the would-be elite managers of all aspects of society, the progressives sought to institute immigration restriction as a way of controlling and culling the eugenic qualities of what they saw as the nation’s herd of human racial “stock.” Using IQ tests (delivered in English and containing many questions relating to baseball or other aspects of Americana) of World War I army recruits as pseudo-scientific proof of the mental inferiority of immigrants, the progressives pushed through laws in the 1920s sharply restricting the immigration of Jews, Slavs, Italians, and other Southern and Eastern Europeans into the United States.

The same crowd created environmentalism as a political movement in order to restrict access to America’s natural resources. They also created the federal bureaucracy as a way of restricting Americans’ personal liberty. Thus, if you go to the redwood forest in California today, you will encounter a plaque to the three leaders of the Save the Redwoods League, Madison Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Charles Merriam. All three were eugenicists and personal associates of Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism’s founding father. Grant was also vice president of the Immigration Restriction League and the author of the Aryan-supremacist classic, The Passing of the Great Race.

Osborn was the vice president of the American Eugenics Society and president of the American Museum of Natural History. In his remarkable keynote speech to the Third International Congress on Eugenics held at the museum in 1932, Osborn drew the connection between environmentalism, immigration restriction, and eugenics clearly by stating that overpopulation by allegedly inferior people (including in the United States, with a population of 125 million) was causing resource destruction and unemployment. Two years later, Osborn received the Goethe Medal from Adolf Hitler, but then died, leaving his part in the cause to be carried on by his son, Fairfield Osborn, who kicked off the postwar environmentalist movement with his 1948 bestseller Our Plundered Planet, and his nephew, American Eugenics Society president Frederick Osborn, who, together with John D. Rockefeller III, founded the population control movement flagship Population Council in 1952. It is from this rotten tree that the anti-immigration movement has sprung.

A rotten tree cannot bear good fruit.

America is not a race state. It is a country defined by a set of ideas, and when people choose to accept those ideas they become Americans, as fully so as any — and perhaps more so than most — regardless of how recently they or their ancestors arrived upon our shores. If you peruse the roll call of the nation’s leaders in science, engineering, medicine, industry, business, literature, soldiering, and politics (including, most definitely, conservative journalism), you will see many names whose presence on these shores the eugenicists would have precluded if they could. Yet they are here, along with myriads of others of their many kinds, and this nation would not be remotely as vibrant, inventive, prosperous, or powerful without them.

This is the true American tradition, which, as conservatives, we must defend, regardless of the antics of demagogues who seek to drive us down another course. Societies become decadent when they abandon their formative principle. We should not abandon ours, which is inclusion and growth, not exclusion and stasis. Americans are not weaklings who need to cower behind an exclusionary curtain, shivering in fear that if too many join us there might not be enough sinecures to go around. Rather, our continuing custom should be to bravely welcome new talent into our ranks, sure in our knowledge, and in our faith, that the more of us there are, the more opportunities we can create, and the more great things we can do.

Americans comprise 4 percent of the world’s population, yet are responsible for half its inventions. Consequently the world needs more Americans, and so do we.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics, a Senior Fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of "Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil". His newest book, "Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism" has just been published by Encounter Books.

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1.
Mark

Sir,

The US does not need a new immigration policy. It simply needs to enforce the existing laws on immigration. This is simply one example among many where there are laws on the books that our officials simply choose to ignore. Furthermore, I have not heard anyone saying we should exclude immigrants from the workforce. I have heard people say we should exclude ILLEGAL immigrants from the workforce. Do you have a problem with this distinction? Coming from an obviously learned man, I find many of your ideas as expressed in this article troubling.

If you ever saw what hoops a legal immigrant had to jump through, you would understand that we do need a rationalization of immigration policy.
Our current immigration “policy” is a textbook example of anarcho-tyranny; legal immigrants are at the mercy of bureaucratic tyrants and an archaic, screwed-up system, while illegal aliens and their spawn are jumped to the head of the line.

They’re doing no background investigations at all. After much uproar, they’re finally doing searches of data-bases of known severe criminals. But some have gotten past that with an easily-obtained legal name change. And the US government officials consider even such weak measures to be an extreme burden.

What they should be doing is sending out teams of people to visit applicants and their families, neighbors, teachers, professors, employers, former co-workers… and then charging the applicant and his sponsor for the reasonable costs. It should be less extensive than the kind of investigations regularly done on US citizens applying for a DoD Secret clearance. And this should be before they get a tourist visa or exchange visa or student visa, certainly before they get a work visa. And then when they upgrade their visa, e.g. from F to adding an OPT, or F to H-1B, or H-1B to green card (as part of the PERM process), there should be an incremental check of what they’d been up to since first entering the USA.

A number of articles have reported that visa application examiners are penalized for rejecting more than a tiny fraction of applicants, or asking for additional docs to corroborate claims made on the application. Getting official copies of the claimed credentials/docs (and investigating the institutions which issue the credentials/docs since we’ve been so lax for so long) should be just the beginning of a proper background investigation.

It should be difficult to come here. Why should it be easy? Unfortunately, there really isn’t much of a background check on the folks coming here legally either.

It is time to END mass immigration. We allow over a million folks a year. They are not assimilating. Many are getting on welfare. It is time to get back to more sane immigration numbers…no more than 100,000 to 200,000 a year. We must also end muslim immigration.

Because America benefits tremendously from hoovering up the ‘best and brightest’ from around the world. A sensible immigration policy should be trivially easy for those you want, and very hard for those you don’t.

Several of my friends who studied STEM subjects at Oxford and Cambridge later moved to America; they typically seem to have spent five or six years and thousands of dollars in legal fees to get a green card so they couldn’t be thrown out at any moment if they lost the job that provided their work permit. There are many countries who would like to have those people and would have given them the equivalent of a green card in a year or less.

What you have today is quite the opposite of a sensible policy. The people you want face years of jumping through hoops to immigrate legally, while anyone who can sneak over the border has politicians lining up to help them.

If only that were what we were doing. I have no quarrel with those advocating bringing in the genuinely “best and brightest” for a change.

If you know of some honest, peaceful folks with IQs over 160 (and/or SAT, ACT, LSAT, MCAT, GRE scores in at least the top half of a percent), let’s consider recruiting some of them for a change instead of continuing this devastating flood of cheap young pliant foreign labor with questionable ethics.

The NIGHTMARE act, is a non-starter. They’ve already proven they’re not honest, peaceful people. Eisenhower proved that a million illegal aliens could be deported by a combination of conscientioius direct removal and incentives. There’s a bit of seemingly intentional ambiguity being abused. It’s one thing to be lenient/generous with someone who was brought in when he was under 7 years old, and another thing with someone who was 16 before he and his parents invaded. Invaders should not be conflated with the visa over-stayers; both need to be discouraged. We’ve got separate programs for genuine refugees, so that is yet another topic.

Glancing at those BLS numbers again, there are about 37M too many immigrants in the United States.

Well, we need to repeal the 60′s-era Immigration Law that has enshrined “family re-unification” into law, and opened the border to the mass movement of less-than-skilled immigrants while keeping out the highly-skilled.
If we need “field workers”, re-create the Bracero Program; just ensure that they leave when their visa expires.

Yes the problem is that politicians of both parties just decided they would not enforce the law and the result was not a wave of illegal scientists and engineers but a wave of uneducated, semi-skilled, and in some cases semi-literate laborers who are a net drain on society. Go to any fast food restaurant and you are likely to see some of these folks rather than our high-school kids getting their feet wet in their first jobs.

Illegal aliens are the death of our nation. CA will NEVER recover & the fools running our state are even gonna give illegal aliens CA driver’s licenses now! This is SO wrong in so many ways. Illegal aliens that are are not prosecuted & deported simply spit on all legal immigrants as well as the rule of law. It is a FEDERAL LAW they are breaking here! Just try breaking some other federal law & see what happens. The end result is that we have become a nation of judicial & executive branch tyranny. We are now ruled by fiat, NOT laws by any stretch of the imagination. Just use the argument that we shouldn’t enforce federal law such as abortion & see the liberals squirm. We are literally watching & living through the death of our nation due to cowardly & foolish legislators & lawlessness run amock.

In all honesty the issue with CA isn’t illegal immigration. The problem is Leftist policies.
Now, massive illegal immigration is a byproduct of over-indulged Leftist policies and does provide a positive feedback effect (i.e. causing to increase the condition (Leftist policies) that caused the effect; not “positive” as in “good”), but I think you have cause and effect reversed.

Hypothetically, if we’d lived in a society where I was the ONLY educated, heterosexual, Catholic married person in the U.S. surrounded by LEGAL, EDUCATED, LAW ABIDING, HARD-WORKING, NON-ENTITLEMENT RECIPIENT 1st generation ‘immigrants’ you purposely and vaguely purport – I’m all in. That society would be my nirvana!

Like poster, ‘Mark’ had said – our supposed, ‘broken immigration system’ (per Uhbama and other amnesty-pimps) is NOT being implemented. Thus the ‘broken’ system.

If the 100 + year old Fed Immigration Bill was implemented, it’s for short periods of time, never-ending loopholes and bureaucratic red tape working in favor of ILLEGALS – is being spun THIS time by our CiC, SoS, HSS Heads!

Or state’s LEGALLY passed Bills to curb the invasion into their states causing indefinite damage are then demised, suspended or gutted by the very same types screaming, ‘broken immigration system’.

The DoJ’s AAG recent threats to AZ’s MCSO to shut off their Federal funding altogether to stop.. doing their job!

Doc, 4 southwest U.S. states border a 3rd World country, Mexico. Mexico has proven it has NO concern for their porous Northern border protection whereas their southern border is strongly fortified, protected. Often using brute force.

One ripple effect is the S.W. USA. That area ‘boasts’ of the highest # of illegals nationwide. Due to decades of the SW looking the other way per immigration, spending 100′s of billions of taxpayer dollars THEY DON’T HAVE to accommodate, encourage assimilation, creating nonsensical degrees, EEO opportunities in nearly EVERY facet of illegal’s life, their government’s, law enforcement agencies scoffing or forced to look the other way at illegal’s, anchor babies DUI’s and multiple felonies ad infinitum..

Resulting in AZ, CA and NV ranking 47th-49th nationwide for H.S. public education’s graduation scores. Their bettering ONLY lowly MS.

Viva la ‘Diversity’ or ‘Progressivism’ right, Doc?

‘Rational’ Immigration Policy. I’m in accord with your encouraging educated people. Though first and foremost, which has been the case for 40 + years – the illegal invasion should be tackled and remedied first.

This logic remains valid, albeit with less clarity, for young adults of a lesser eminence but still, on-net, above-average prospects, including but not limited to those in the military or college-accepted high school graduates who would be enfranchised by the DREAM act.

What I am saying is that logic dictates that our policy with respect to the DREAM act candidates should not be dictated by either anger or pity, but by a cold rational calculation which answers exactly the same question that needs to be asked regarding all other prospective immigrants, to wit:

“Would the admittance of these people add to or detract from the prosperity and power of the United States of America?”

Respecting the DREAM act candidates, the following is true:
1. They are young people at the beginning of their working career, and thus have the entire cost of their raising from infancy already paid, and a long time ahead before they will require social security. This is an important net economic plus.

2. They are graduates of American high schools, who have been admitted to either university or the military. These achievements place them in the upper half of their peers in terms of general prospects and ability.

3. They speak English.

4. When they graduate or complete their military service, they will, in many cases, have skills that are very desirable for America and very undesirable to be sent abroad. Do we really want veterans of US military training to be kicked out of the country and sent to Mexico or China? I don’t think so.

All of these points make it clear that it would be much better for America to keep the DREAM act candidates than to kick them out. That is NOT to say that I support the DREAM act AS WRITTEN, as I understand that its fine print contains numerous booby traps that would allow it to be used for purposes other than the advertised one of providing a path to citizenship for the well-defined attractive group of candidates that are its selling point.

What I am saying is that a logical analysis shows that these people represent a positive acquisition for the nation, and so, rather than forfeit this issue to abuse by the Democrats, Republicans should write a CLEAN bill that meets this need. As I understand it, Senator Marco Rubio has plans to do so, and we should support him if he does. To do otherwise would be very bad policy and very bad politics.

There are 40 million immigrants in the United States. The Democrats would love to paint the GOP as an anti-immigrant party. That is why Obama did not pass the DREAM act in early 2009, when he easily could have rammed it through Congress. He was saving it to use as an election year issue. We should not play into his hands. We must make it clear that we are not the anti-immigration party, but the rational immigration party.

You forget something….many illegals are lying and saying they are a dreamer. Plus, this rewards lawbreaking. Reward lawbreaking and you get more lawbreaking.

What is really at stake here is the sovereignty of our nation. Mexico formed a dept. in their gov’t in 1982 devoted to taking over the Western US….RECONQUISTA. This hateful garbage is also being taught in universities and some highschools have allowed Mexican gov’t curriculum to be taught to the Spanish speaking students!

Our state passed a law last year against illegal immigration and after one of the meetings (before it was voted out of committee) a guy from Mexico said that their laws are better and that they are going to turn this into Mexico.

You also ignore the fact that if they get legal status it will be easier for them to access welfare and they can send for family members and also petition all their illegal family members that are here now to stay! They will then vote this country right out from under us.

Approx. 25 Americans die everyday at the hands of illegals. Half thru drunk driving (it’s not illegal to drive drunk in Mexico) and half thru murder (Mexico empties their prisons out and brings the prisoners to the border).

I also think it is REALLY dumb to arm invaders by putting them in our military. Really dumb. Invade and we’ll arm ya!

Approx. 90,000 Americans have been killed/murdered by illegals since 9-11. That is an invasion.

Republicans show up and demonstrate why they simply cannot be trusted with sharp knives or scissors.

What is the first rule of Democratic liberal politics?

–He who controls the definition of words can control their meaning.–

So your scenario sounds fine to you. What I see are massive loopholes that can be exploited for any purpose under the sun. So no thank you. If you were trying to change minds, you failed miserably. If you were trying to provide an alternative, still fail.

1. Illegal aliens are exactly that: they =MUST= be deported.

2. The border =MUST= be fenced off and guarded with national guard troops, active military forces or remotely operated gun platforms.

3. Cross the border illegally and you get a 40 year suspended prison sentence. The next time you’re found in the USA illegally you don’t get a trial, you don’t go before a judge, you go straight to a prison cell or internment camp in the Mojave Desert. E.g. Death Valley.

4. If you were brought into the USA as a child and want to become a citizen that’s fine. But you =PARENTS= who knowingly violated the law to do so go to prison for 20 years and get deported permanently after release with an additional 20 year suspended sentence.

First of all, we cannot have a sane system which allows chain migration. “Reuniting families” is not a good enough reason to allow unending numbers to come or stay here. Two, foreigners today are given FAR more than our grandparents generation were and we are forced to pay for it. The Leftists who infest our government coddle immigrants to no end. Three, I am willing to bet that most immigrant business owners employ far more family and friends than native born people. While this widens the tax base, it has less of an affect on the unemployment rate for natives. America is about far more than economic opportunity-It is also a NATION, with shared sacrifice and CULTURE, something that is spat upon when it concerns Americans, but extolled for every other group who comes here. I’m sick of feeling like a stranger in my own country.

If only deciding what to do with STEM graduates were the issue at hand.

What is the issue is dealing with a country slowly becoming Mexico, namely, ours. While many Mexican and other Latino immigrants do desire to become fully American (My extended family included, I was born here of Mexican parents, one legal immigrant and one native born). A great many of the illegals have no interest in this as a primary goal, and slowly mexicanize their communities, bringing with them the poverty, crime, lack of education, drugs, gangs, trash, graffiti, bribery, street side vendors without licenses, and even roosters they had in mexico. That’s not a racial indictment, it’s a cultural one. VDH’s article on the Road Warriors should be required reading. I have seen first hand what he discusses in central CA, and elsewhere.

There is a reason young STEM professionals don’t flock to Mexico for training and jobs. And the more our country comes to resemble Mexico, the D.R. or wherever, the more we’ll lose the option of giving status to STEM graduates. Because they’ll stop coming at all.

I have no quarrel with those who wish to secure the border. As I said in the first paragraph of this article, I regard those concerns as legitimate. By all means, build the fence.

My quarrel is with those, such as the Center for Immigration Studies policy director quoted in the article, who wish to prevent legal immigration of young skilled foreigners, especially those who have graduated American universities. As I demonstrate in the article, the acquisition of such people would benefit the nation greatly, and therefore labor-protectionist policies to exclude them harm the nation, greatly.

Nobody ever said anything about legal immigrants. However, with the mess we are currently in I’d stop all immigration for at least 20 years. Slam the door shut so we have time to sort everything out.

Our main problem is wholly the illegal variety who have invaded this country. These people (nearly 70 million of them) have created a vast crimewave of violence across the country. It takes them less than a year to destroy entire neighborhoods and they’ve brought our hospitals to the brink of collapse. They are a menace on the roads and our educational system has stopped bothering even to educate them.

The are a plague. The are the barbarian inside the gate and they are pillaging our country. They are thieves who think they are ENTITLED to loot and steal every resource we have.

I despise these people and I wouldn’t feel one little twitch or qualm about rounding every last one of them up crying and screaming and carting them off to the nearest border town and unloading them. I’d also start a military action against Mexico since they have CLEARLY declared war upon us and have been invading us demographically for decades.

Japan is doing just fine, tsunamis aside. We need fewer people, not more. You can’t grow indefinitely without destroying a nation. Japan has no cities like Detroit and have been smart enough to remain Japanese.

Hogwash! How many Americans are out of work because illegals aritificially depress wages. Landscapers, construction and all sorts of domestic labor that’s been overrun by illegals. You can’t even go into a MacDonalds anymore and get someone who speaks English.

FB is right. We need an America for Americans. Oh – we also need to burn Detroit to the ground!

FB may be right, but I’m not sure downward spiral of Detroit is a good example of the problems resulting from the government’s failure to enforce immigration laws. The downward spiral of Detroit is due primarily to the corrupt cabal consisting of labor unions, the African-American political aristocracy, and the Democratic Party.

“How many Americans are out of work because illegals aritificially depress wages.”

None.

Also, protectionist policies artificially keep wages high. And your forgetting that artificially higher wages means artificially higher prices, meaning that you want to bone over all consumers for the questionable benefit of just a small number of people.

After 50 million abortions on demand, does anyone wonder why? America has the MOST LIBERAL abortion laws in the first world, a fact you will NEVER hear the Left admit. They constantly compare our country to Europe, but not on this issue.

Our legal immigration policy has a family reunification bias. If the young workers come with their grandparents we cannot afford them. If the DREAM is anchor children, we cannot afford the dream. Now try suggesting that we don’t allow relatives in and see what names your called.

Don’t you think those folks should go back to their countries and help make their countries better?

Is this really a big problem to have these folks go back to improve their own countries? I know many employers love the foreigners who are highly skilled…they pay them way less. Driving the wages down for Americans.

Short term business interests should never trump the long term soveriegnty of this great nation.
You also forget that some of those skilled foreigners are muslims that want to work in our nuclear facilities….hmmmm…

The writer needs to get out more. Illegal aliens are destroying California. Here in Oklahoma a Comanche friend tells me what few constructuon jobs there are go to crews full of illegals. Before we turn on the compassion we need to control the border.

It seems as cowardly as it is pointless to speak largely of “Americans” in a politico/social environment in which racial hatreds are being systematically stoked against one race in particular.

You seem not to be able to face the fact that generations of Latin Americans have been taught above all else to loath and despise gringos. Gringos are white American males — the same ethnic group “affirmative action” has specifically and devastatingly targeted.

But since none of this can be openly discussed — anymore than we can cite FBI stats showing it is white boys who are most liable to random attacks — we remain desperately trying to push a rope uphill. For white folks to do anything else would be… racist.

The unfortunate thing is that right now immigration is a dirty word to many voters. Recent reports show over 40% of immigrants are still on welfare after decades of living in the country. There are too many college grads and experienced technicians working low paying jobs, if they’re even working.

When the border gets sealed and the economy is growing we might have a better chance at a rational policy. Allowing more immigration, regardless of the skill set or education of the immigrants, is about as low a priority as I can think of for right now.

I’m sorry but a policy that “maximizes the population of working aged people” while turning a blind eye to the fact that this particular group of working aged people HAVE NONE OF THE NECESSARY JOB SKILLS TO ATTAIN A FAMILY SUPPORTING WAGE simply creates another large group of households completely dependent on the generosity of US taxpayers. Since we are already asking our children and grandchildren to sacrifice their generations’ prosperity to fund a massive group of soon-to-be dependent boomers and a massive national debt, it seems rather selfish to also saddle them with 12 million households of dependent Latin American immigrants as well.
I realize it is uncomfortable to have honest conversations about the uninvited guest workers currently inviting themselves to the table at the rate of nearly 700,000/year. After all their American citizen children will soon eclipse all other American born children and be the majority of voters. However it is just one the difficult jobs we elect people to do. If our elected officials continue to find this too difficult to discuss, they should remove themselves consideration for election to public office.

What rational immigration policy invites those dependant on welfare to its country? Another issue that the pro-immigration camp won’t address. Nor will they address the fact that immigrants vote overwhelmingly for more welfare and bigger government. Immigrants want welfare and dependancy. And those that do work drive down wages. The problems with health care is not overpaid doctors, but too many people receiving too much care at the expense of the taxpayer, many of whom are immigrants, many of those illegal aliens. Also unionized nurses who are truely overpaid considering their educational level. Compare that to areas where immigration are driving down wages, such as construction and other blue collar jobs, jobs where the lower end of the American population are hit hardest. Of course those underpaid and unemployed Americans go into the welfare system because of immigrants. Just as those immigrants who do work at the lower end jobs are also dependant on welfare.

The OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of ILLEGALS are Mexicans.
Period.
Now why do they deserve special status as compared to all other peoples?

Mexico is a failure. It is a failure as a result of its economic, political, and social culutres. Yet, all I hear from illegal Mexicans is how fantastic their culture is and why they should not integrate. Again, Mexico is a failure of its social, economic, and political cultures. The only reason they come here is for the free goodies. And that makes sense, given that their political culture for most of the 20th century was socialism.

Tell you what: let’s let them in on the following conditions:
1. Mexico gives us 1 barrel of oil free per illegal Mexican for the next 10 years. (Interesting article in the WSJ 2 months ago praising Mexico govt for not incurring debt during the global crisis of 2088 until now. However, the WSJ fails to note that this was accompolished by not providing services to their citizens. Strange isn’t it: they have the richest guy on the world and several top earning compainies… cement and oil).
2. All monies transferred to Mexico via banks or wire services get taxed at a 50% rate.
3. All lawful Americans who paid taxes over the last 5 years, can opt not to pay taxes for the next 5. additionally, all illegals pick up the tab for those Americans who take this option, in addition to their own tab. (Hey — that’s fair — the lawful americans paid for more than their own to medical care and education.)

Actually, I mis-typed: it should be 1 barrel/ month.
that’s a significant amount of oil per month: ~30 million barrels.
And with oil in the $90 per barrel range, about the cost of low care health insurance for these 30 million Mexicans.

“Setting aside criticism of its questionable statistic (the total number of U.S. unemployed is 13 million)

Uh, STEM jobs would account for a large percentage of work, and by your own figure of 13 million unemployed, this would only be 13.8%, believable. However, she said “unemployed or working in other professions” and that is easily believable. I’m not sure just how you feel it is questionable, but please, make that case, rather than the claim.

Why does it matter where jobs come from? Your arugment is that we should keep illegals and give them green cards, or amnesty as conservatives call it. Do you seriously think jobs come FROM illegals?

“Are they a fixed resource with only so many to go around?

Fixed? No. Finite? Certainly, and getting smaller every day thanks to higher taxes that AREN’T paid by illegals (and don’t think green carders would pay them, either, they’ll only want the green card to get benefits, that’s been shown). And with a smaller pool of jobs, the wages dry up, the unemployment goes up, and mathmeticians and lab assistants start working at the Quik Pik.

“Then, is it the case that there were 150 million jobs available here when the pilgrims landed and they have now been filled up?”

No, this is just you ridiculing again, because you lack facts or substance or, you know, logical argument.

“Are the present high American unemployment rates actually being caused by overpopulation?

Again with the ridicule. We don’t want foreigners here, so, you call that the same as ‘overpopulation’? Yeah, how about “overpopulation of people who have no right to be here taking jobs and tax money from people who were born here and pay their taxes and don’t mooch off the system”? Yeah, that sounds much better.

“If so, why then were unemployment rates three times as high in 1932, when the U.S. workforce was 1/3 its present size?”

Because you’re comparing percentages to actual numbers, which is the same as lying. Busted. First of all, they counted unemployment differently then. Secondly, you’re talking about unemployment rate which is a percentage, and then comparing it to size of workforce, which is actual numbers. And third, you assume that the two have anything to do with immigration without one shred of proof, and completely ignoring all the things that led to that unemployment, trying to make us look at it in a vacuum. Liar liar pants on fire.

Add to that the common lie of the liberal weenie that is calling them immigrants. There is a considerable difference in illegal immigration and immigration. You claim statistics for immigrants that are false when you consider only illegal immigrants. You try to hide the bad news of illegal immigration by mixing it with the proud heritage that is the LEGAL immigrant, the one that really gets trashed in all this.

But the worse lie of all is that America will somehow benefit if we just pay for his college, his way of life, and give him a monthly check.

Communist, that’s what YOU are. I seriously hope you don’t consider yourself a conservative in any way, shape or form.

“And with a smaller pool of jobs, the wages dry up, the unemployment goes up, and mathmeticians and lab assistants start working at the Quik Pik.”

Yep – Back in the late 70s after Carter had trashed the economy and everyone was sick to death of solar panels on the white house and cardigan sweaters, I had my first job at McDonalds. My manager was a PhD Marine Biologist.

Z-Boy is just pushing an agenda favorable to the left. I will note that the point has been made that immigrants of all kinds are an undue burden on our public assistance.

No, Z-Boy wants to bloat, paying no mind to who might foot the bill. We have plenty of Black citizen’s who deserve the work, and can’t find it. The only reason to import workers is to fill the militant wing of the left.

Z-Boy should not be allowed here: if I want this twaddle, I will go to the NYT.

Mr. Zubrin is so completely wrong, on everything he wrote, I don’t know where to begin.

First, immigration of the wrong kind of people is a disaster for America. As Prof. Putnam’s studies show, water is wet, and diversity is a cancer on any society. It produces distrust, among people of the same ethnic and socio-economic background, as well as between. It produces removal from society, corruption of social institutions, corrupt government, and reliance on family and kin to provide protection and support. In short, diversity ranges from societies like the Roman Empire, Yugoslavia, the Russian Empire, Syria, Iraq, India, and Pakistan. These are not models for success. Diversity, and mass immigration of non-Whites produces a brutal Thunderdome style struggle for spoils, anti-White politics, and a resultant White identity politics that seeks to destroy the spoils system all together.

We call that White identity politics … libertarianism. This just in, Whites resent being made to pay for non-Whites. Forever.

For the second bill due for diversity and massive non-White immigration is the utter failure of Mexicans and most immigrants save wealthy Chinese and the Japanese to be anything other than permanent dependents on Whites. Illegitimacy is over 50% among Hispanics, and growing to Black proportions, that’s a poverty generator proven throughout history (think a bit on the resources a family headed by one vs. two parents creates).

Third, America’s problem is massive unemployment among WHITE ENGINEERS. Who face the triple threat of outsourcing, racial preferences AGAINST WHITES, and network informal discrimination by non-Whites in high-growth areas like Information Technology. How this works is shown by Microsoft. Which outsources a great deal of development to India. Where it does not, once an Indian Project manager comes on, he hires through the H1-B program, friends, relatives, and relatives of friends from villages back home, discriminating against Whites. Since Whites by definition (of AG Eric Holder and nearly every Supreme Court Decision in the last fifty years) HAVE NO CIVIL RIGHTS AT ALL, Whites are left with no recourse save in the end, burning down the system with … Libertarian politics. This is particularly true for White men who have NO ZERO ZILCH NADA lobbying group, no Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Louis Farrakhan ready to threaten and inflict violence at a moments notice on their behalf.

America’s unemployment rate by high tech WHITE engineers would drop by about HALF if we kicked out all those non-citizen tech graduates.

In fact, Zubrin is indicative of the folly of the elites, who are marching the US towards a HOT civil war, over … MONEY. MONEY!

There is no chance at all that places like Detroit or Atlanta or Chicago will be either terrible or better run dependencies on White middle class taxpayers. The middle class of Black Atlanta depends on Affirmative Action making metro (both City and Clayton County employees) 95% Black. Detroit, far Blacker (90% vs. Atlanta’s 48% Black) is far worse off, with exurban Whites having fled to their new towns outside Black political control. There is zero chance that people from the Ghetto will ever be working at Boeing, Microsoft, or Apple as engineers and technical people. Even if every White person in the country adopted a Black baby like Charlize Theron and Sandra Bullock. [Stolen Generation anyone?]

That dependency is built-in. Whites can afford to pay off forever, the Black population, so they can have nice things like flatscreen TVS, Xboxes, and $200 sneakers from Nike. What Whites cannot do, and face a civil war over money about, is pay off the Black population and the Hispanic/Mexican one. There just is not enough money, and Hispanics have not generated enough wealth in the last fifty years to move out of dependency. Massive TANF/WIC usage characterizes immigrants, legal and not. So do drug use, illegitimacy, disdain for education, teen pregnancy, and the other ills found in orders of magnitudes higher amounts among Hispanics than Whites. There is not enough money to pay Social Security and Medicare for Whites, and take care of Mexican babies, to put it in blunt terms. Their mothers can’t feed them, they had them at 15 or so. They are kids themselves. [Hispanic fertility is not the result of magic wombs, but having kids while they're still kids.]

Basically not kicking the people out we have here now, illegally, and their kids, insures they will be later in a hot war. And we’ve already reached that point. There is not enough money to feed, clothe, house, provide medical care, and consumer subsidies for the Mexican and Black underclass. Which demand that the White middle class impoverish itself to provide those goodies.

America would probably benefit from letting in people with skills already: White doctors from South Africa, Australia, and Europe, who share the basic cultural assumptions and cannot by definition engage in divisive spoils battles with the majority population.

We’ve had more than half a century of minoritarian rule: rule by the non-majority, over the majority, and stupid posturing about how the majority has to just take it. That time is over, the majority who pay for everything are demanding both a stake in the outcome and a say in the matter. And sooner or later they will get it. Men will fight to the death over a little piece of property or wealth, when it is all they have, to avoid being at the bottom. This is the lesson of history.

Most Americans would happily close the border forever, kick out the illegals, and they are right.

California has been ruined by federal policies that allowed the invasion from the south. Californians were screaming in the 80s about the invasion, but the rest of the country ignored us. Now the prisons are full, neighborhoods ruined, schools unmanageable. Why do you think the world’s 8th largest economy can’t balance it’s budget? Millions of freeloaders on the system, with multigenerational economic dysfunction and poverty. Sure, many are hard-working pleasant people, but most would rather lose a kidney than pay taxes or read a textbook.

Let’s not forget that WE are the ones who allow the pols in charge of sanctuary cities to thumb their noses at our immigration laws.

Dismantle it and they will leave:

Now, if WE start by ensuring that those employers who knowingly hire illegals are punished to the fullest extent of the law, then we’ll be getting somewhere.

Now, if WE decide to throw out the pols who would choose not to follow the rule of law, then we’ll be getting somewhere.

Now, if WE finally decide to finally tackle taboo subjects like entitlements and overhauling an overly burdensome tax code that allows some to get more out of it than what they put in, then we’ll be getting somewhere.

“While immigrants comprise 13 percent of the American population, they own 18 percent of small businesses and, according a recent study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, were responsible for 30 percent of the growth of U.S. small businesses over the past two decades.”

You do realize that the government supplies illegals,minorities and different degrees of immigrants with loans to buy franchises and start small businesses don’t you ? They don’t just fall off the boat to buy businesses .

Legal immigration needs reforming .It is ridiculous difficult and expensive for honest ,legitimate people to become citizens .

But we have massive unemployment and are drowning in illegals.We can’t afford more dependents unless the illegals are removed.

We’ve already had 7 amnesties that assimilated tens of millions of illegals and what do we have to show for it ? Where are the jobs and businesses ?

The higher crime and dependency rates are never worth the billions spent on free education ,medical care,food stamps,housing, new prisoners,diseases imported and drug addictions – deaths that come with them.

Too late! Soon the hispanics will be in the majority and will then open the gates to La Raza at large.Spanish will be the national language and whites the victims of a terrible discrimination. We took the southwest from them by force and now they will take it back through proliferation. If you think whites have performed poorly in politics and economics, just wait until you see the hispanics in action! “Chaos” would be an euphemism.Singapore is still there!

What complete idiot thought it would be a good idea to have ANY permanent immigration when we have a real U-6 unemployment rate of 16%? That doesn’t actually take into account the people who have given up looking for work, either.

Zubrin is wrong, period. We neither need nor want any more immigration of any sort, and all illegals should be frogmarched to the Mexican border and have their asses kicked across it. If we were smart we would tell Mexico that we were going to abrogate NAFTA, withdraw our Ambassador, and immediately deport all Mexicans found to be in the U.S. without proper U.S-approved documentation. If they protested, we could smile and sweetly say that we were only following the same laws THEY have.

Our white population decline comes from white people knowing they MUST save enough money to provide their children a college education, because without it they will be at the absolute bottom of the affirmative action ladder with no chance of getting a decent job.

The immigrants here don’t give a damn about that because they start out right at the top of the affirmative action ladder. They will get need-based scholarships. They have a huge advantage over native-born whites because of the laws that our damned crooked liberal politicians have made that deeply injure the majority population of this country. Lyndon Johnson, may he burn in Hell, deserves to have every white American go down to Texas and urinate on his grave for the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. He, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy lied through their teeth to get that bill passed and they knew full well they were lying even as they gave the Congressional testimony. Typical Democrat behavior.

No more immigrants. None. End all immigration now and run the illegals out. Do that, put AMERICANS back to work, keep the doors closed for another fifty years and MAYBE we can get this country back on track after the Obama disaster.

Securing the border and shaping immigration policy to serve the economic needs of the US are worthy goals, and certainly an improvement over the rent-seeking mishmash we have now. But Mr. Zubrin makes two common mistakes. First, he assumes that an immigrant’s contribution to the economy can be measured beforehand. That, in my experience, is malarkey: I have seen rafts of credentialed but incompetent engineers on H1B’s, but some of the best are the children of hardscrabble immigrants. Plus, many creative fields defy easy measurement. Were the Beatles good enough by any objective measure to qualify in 1960?

The second mistake is overlooking the cultural capital that immigrants can bring (or destroy). Our current system rewards cheaters and thereby destroys social capital. A better way to build social capital is to raffle off the right to nominate non-economic immigrants to INDIVIDUAL AMERICANS, who can go to some .org site and choose tbe next worthy American better than any bureaucrat can.

I’m with you on the crux of your argument – I’ve said for years that we had Ellis Island as a clearinghouse for European immigrants, why not put something like that in El Paso? (And Tucson, and San Diego, and Brownsville). But you make a couple of tangential points that leave some questions.

Regarding education, how do you propose immigrants pay three times the going rate of a college education, when college education is already over-priced and, in most cases, doesn’t increase human capital enough to justify the expense? Do we dump more free loan money into the system, only on people who are at higher risks for both success (the immigrant entrepreneurship you mentioned) and failure (due to language barriers in education and business, and the risks inherent in entrepreneurship, particularly when the entrepreneur is in debt before going into debt for the business)?

Regarding health care, it’s not expensive because doctors are scarce. I think you’ll find that the increasing cost of health care does not correlate with a decreasing supply of doctors. I would suggest that it is more closely related to the increasing supply of money available though insurance and a lack of rational decision-making and price sensitivity on the part of both consumers and providers of care.

These are obviously tangential to your overall point, which is put very well. We need more colorful stories of the terrible, horrible people who make up the foundation of what should be the ash heap of progressive thought.

Here’s how a policy of giving green cards to foreigners who graduate American universities can reduce tuition:

Let’s say you have a state university which charges different rates for in-state and out of state tuition (as nearly all of them do.) Say it has 20,000 students, and needs to raise $200,000 million in tuition to pay its bills. Then, if all the students came from in-state, it would need to charge $10,000 per student.
But if it let’s in 5,000 foreign students, and charged then $20,000 each, it would raise $100 million that way, allowing it to cut the tuition on the 20,000 in-state students to $5,000 each to raise the remaining $100 million.
Of course, the university would now have to serve 25,000 students instead of 20,000 students, but most schools have vacant dorm rooms, and if not, could simply allow the excess students to rent rooms in town. This would help the local economy, and the university would reap further extra income from various fees, book store sales, cafeteria sales, etc.

The net result would be a 50 percent cut in tuition for the in-state students, while providing America with many more job creating STEM graduates at no expense.

I’m one of those medical specialists. If you want to solve the problem you are going to have to cut it out at the roots–eliminate government licensing. It will need to be done with a Constitutional amendment using the logic and sentiment of this portion of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776):
“…no man, or set of men, are entitled to any exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community.”
It was originally meant to prohibit the granting of titles, but the wording could be made such that the government could be prohibited from recognizing people as anything except as equal citizens except for the purposes of employment in the armed services.

Let me propose cutting the Gordian Knot. Let us annex Mexico and other Central American states that engage in a policy of exporting their population to avoid revolution and reform at home. Make them Commonwealths as Puerto Rico. In an instant their ‘illegals’ become ‘legal’. They retain local general governmental autonomy.

Of course this would violate the historical and cultural sovereignty and integrity of each former national entity. However, since those who push amnesty in one form or another support by those acts the end of American sovereignty, they can’t legitimately object to such a proposal. Or is there a separate set of standards for America and a another set for all others when it comes to their right of sovereignty?

Over the past few years, confusion has developed among some in the conservative movement who have allowed a legitimate concern over border security to become conflated with anti-immigration politics.

I’ve read some of Zubrin’s works. he’s a bright guy, no doubt, about certain topics. But he’s no conservative. Or at least, no American conservative.

the most attractive acquisition a society can make is a young adult, whose childhood and education have already been paid for, but whose entire working life still lies ahead.

No, this is only the case if you think that a society is a just a larger-than-usual corporation. If a society is NOT that, then the “acquisition” of a young adult is not necessarily so attractive. Besides, the whole notion that we “acquire assets” via immigration is wrong. Most current immigrants are a net fiscal loss to America. We’re in the same position with respect to immigration as a car company which loses money on every car it sells – but thinks it can make it up by selling MORE CARS.

If the people in Pajama’s Media really believed the arguments they make for open borders, they’d be arguing for open borders for Israel. All the wonders which open borders can supposedly confer on America, it could confer on Israel too. But we all know that it will be a cold day in hell before PJM starts demanding that Israel open its borders to the world.

STEM graduates are by far the most promising because their advanced training allows them to create not only small businesses, but large ones, including such recent examples as Intel, SpaceX, Google, eBay, Nvidia, and Yahoo. The nation is indeed suffering from a shortage of such people.

This is simply untrue, as shown by the very existence of Intel, SpaceX, Google, eBay, Nvidia, Yahoo, etc. It’s odd that all these companies came into existence in country with a shortage of the people who create them. There is no shortage of STEM graduates in America.

This is a very strange comment.
Apparently it argues that since immigrant entrepreneurs have already created many successful industries, we don’t need any more such people, or such industries. On the contrary, we certainly do.

Foreign students that come to the U.S. and pay triple the tuition of their American counterparts provide a major subsidy to our educational system. Each such person effectively pays not only for his own college education, but that of two Americans as well. If we were to add the incentive of a green card to the degree, the numbers of such people would expand considerably and make university education much more affordable for Americans.

People with college degrees, especially STEM degrees, are net job creators.
Of course not every engineering graduate is a job creator. Some of them may even be complete duds who can’t even work as an engineer, let alone create businesses that hire others.

But it order to produce the winners, you have to educate the lot. The more STEM graduates we have, the more job creators we will have, and the more jobs there will be, not only for STEM graduates, but for all the different kinds of people that the businesses they create will hire.

That is why it is of enormous benefit to keep the foreigners who graduate with STEM degrees from American universities, rather then give them away.

Furthermore, by offering such people green cards, we will force foreign countries to raise their pay rates, thereby enhancing the competitive position of American industry overall.

In addition, by competing for foreign talent in this way, we will undermine foreign tyrannies everywhere. For example, how long could China maintain its one-child policy if Chinese graduating from American universities had the option of staying here, where they could raise a family? Not long.
By keeping foreign STEM graduates out, we are undermining our economy while protecting foreign tyrannies from US competition.

This article sickens me the way the author conflates illegal immigration with legal immigration, and then tries to soft pedal it as a ‘first principle’. Try this as a first principle: First follow the law. If you are a citizen and you don’t like the law as it exists, petition your representative in Congress to change the law, or run for office yourself. Illegal immigrants are present in this country unlawfully and should be returned to their home countries where they can follow the existing path to citizenship, with few exceptions.
Border security does indeed go hand in hand with immigration law, as there is no adherance to immigration laws without border security. Without border security, immigration laws or useless words on useless paper. It does not benefit the United States to have those outside of this nation to decide who comes here, nor does it benefit the nation to base the following or modification of immigration law on the wishy washy, warm and fuzzy, feel good gibberish found in this article.

the statistics back up the stereotype. While immigrants comprise 13 percent of the American population

Immigrants are not 13% of the American working age population. Adjusting for age makes immigrants look a lot less likely to own their own business. Incidentally, if immigrants are such terrific entrepreneurs, why do we have to give them affirmative action?

It is odd that the anti-immigrant’s labor-protectionist argument has been allowed to pass with so little challenge, as it obviously contradicts every well-proven principle of free-enterprise economics.

There is nothing in free-enterprise economics which necessitates the free movement of labor, aka the free movement of people. The whole point of free trade in stuff is that it removes the need for the movement of people – a movement which does tend to result in wars.

since the first Thanksgiving, America’s tradition has been to welcome immigrants

Jews are obsessed with the notion that America has a moral obligation to welcome anybody on Earth who wants to come here. But it’s not any sort of conservative idea. Open borders are the negation of countries. In this case, open borders are the negation of America.

the progressives pushed through laws in the 1920s sharply restricting the immigration of Jews ..

Yeah, there we have it. It was not “the progressives” doing this though. The “progressives” have always supported open borders, just as the progressive Robert Zubrin does today.

America is not a race state. It is a country defined by a set of ideas,

I don’t recognize your authority to make such pronouncements. If “race states” really upset you, than you should start objecting to the existence of Israel.

“Would the admittance of these people add to or detract from the prosperity and power of the United States of America?”

They would detract from its power and prosperity. They are already doing so. If you are
unaware of the demographic profile of Hispanics then I suggest that you acquaint yourself with the topic before writing again on immigration.

Americans comprise 4 percent of the world’s population, yet are responsible for half its inventions. Consequently the world needs more Americans, and so do we.

Inventions are not a function of the size of the American population. Large swathes of people in America – and in the world – are distinctly lacking in the ability to invent things. The overwhelming majority of all inventions are the work of Europeans, either in Europe or in America. Asians are responsible for the just about all of the remainder. Hispanics, so-called, are some of the least inventive people on the planet. A list of all the great inventors from south of the Rio Grande would fit in a single page with a lot of room to spare. It is not the case that increasing Americas share of the world population to 8 percent would, in and of itself, double the number of American inventions per year. It’s rather shocking that a scientist like Zubrin can make such a basic error.

Dr. Zubrin: Your conclusion that immigrants are notoriously entrepreneurial is drawn from historical trends established well before any serious flow of immigration existed from outside Europe. Those trends show that European immigrants are indeed highly entrepreneurial (or at least have been so). But to conclude from this that all immigrants will have the same kind of beneficial economic impact, despite deep differences in the culture and customs that drive social behavior, is folly. It would be akin to touring the bustling streets of Tel Aviv and concluding that the Middle East must somehow naturally give rise to freedom, modernity, and prosperity. As Mitt Romney was recently criticized by the media for insisting: culture matters. I would go further and argue that there are harder features to human diversity than culture, with their bases in comparative genetics. Unfortunately, polite society seems completely uninterested in facing such possibilities, whatever the data might say. I ask only that you consider the possibility. What if the data turn out to show unmistakably that Europeans — for whatever reasons, cultural or otherwise — make better immigrants? I’m not suggesting that we ought to systematically discriminate by race or national origin, just that our immigration policies are designed with some realism in mind. Immigrants per se, just by virtue of being warm bodies, are not the magical economic panacea that many neoconservatives seem to believe they are. Every free society needs to open itself to the world to some extent, lest it risk becoming an insular North Korea. But this needs to be done with the proper degree of clear-eyed frankness about the potential ills of mass immigration, equally as about the potential benefits.

Great article! Good to see a reasonable discussion of the topic without the usual nativism. I think anyone who would leave their homes and extended families and follow the rules to become an American citizen will probably be a good citizen. I have little patience with illegal immigration and think the border needs to be sealed. However I also understand regardless of my personal opinion the majority of Americans will not think it is fair to deport someone who came here as a child and has spent all their life here. Whether with the Dream Act or some other law these people will need to be legally integrated into the fabric of the country. This would be much easier if the border was controlled.

It reads in part: “Immigrants are more willing to work and work harder when they do so than natives do, right? Among those aged 18-65, yes, technically, by a statistical rounding error, with 67.7% of immigrants holding a job and 67.6% of natives doing the same.”

“The native numbers, of course, are dragged down by the poor performance of native blacks, only 56.6% of whom are employed. The native white figure, at 70.5%, is a few points better than the immigrant number is.”

It’d be interesting to know whether those dang furriners without ‘jobs’ are the owners of the businesses that employ local workers. We know what the ‘without jobs’ native-Americans are doing – they are part of the 99% and are either Occupying Whatever or standing in line outside the Benefits Office.

What is the probable economic impact of many more Presidents like Obama in our future, along with many more Democratic majorities in Congress?

Hispanics vote Democratic. The current massive influx of Hispanics has already converted formerly Republican states like California into Democratic party bastions. Texas already has a Hispanic majority among children. Once those children grow up Texas will look like California does today. What price Zubrin’s progressive “growth agenda” then?

Those who imagine that Hispanics will vote Republican in exchange for amnesty are ignorant of history. The Reagan amnesty of 1986 did not result in an increase in the GOP’s share of the Hispanic vote, it resulted in a decrease in it, for reasons which would be blindingly obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with political demographics.

The reason why Obama is currently President of the United States can be traced directly to Zubrin’s “people are interchangeable items” philosophy. If America had the same demographic composition in 2008 that it had in 1986, Obama would not have won the last Presidential election.

The demographic transformation of America spells the death of any sort of limited-government political philosophy.

There are all indications that USA has more college graduates than economy is able to absorb. And yet Zubrin, without citing any data whatsoever, wants a few more millions to what? Reduce wages even farther?
Provide more voters for Democrats?

“survey by Rutgers University came to the same conclusion: Half of graduates in the past five years say their jobs didn’t require a four-year degree and only 20% said their first job was on their career path. “Our society’s most talented people are unable to find a job that gives them a decent income,” says Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science and public policy at Rutgers. ”
Fromhttp://www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/content/Chasing_American_Dream_Report.pdf

Importing people is a magic dust for progressives: when economy is good we need more of it because, allegedly, we have shortage of xxxx (insert occupation of the day here).
When economy is good we need more immigration because immigrants will create hundreds and thousands of Apples, Googles, Microsofts, General Motors and the rest of SP 500. They could do it because they all scientific geniuses and billionaire investors. Never mind if they picked fruit or answered help calls from technically challenged morons in their home countries.
The Magic dust of the US will make them geniuses and entrepreneurs.

There are lots of immigrants (Latinos alone will be 50% of the nation’s population), so it’s not surprising that they’re small business owners. But small business can be dozens of things. Most of the businesses in the ethnic zones (such as LA’s Koreatown) are restaurants and specialty businesses who almost certainly hire illegal aliens who are paid under the table. And the impact of small businesses on the economy is OVERRATED, even libertarians acknowledge this.

A rational and moral amnesty plan has to be subjective. That is, you prioritize individuals who is demonstrably an asset to the country. The pro amnesty crowd kinda understands this, which is why they’ll pretend some undocumented Asian whiz kid at the top of his class at UCLA struggling to find tuition is typical for all illegal aliens.

There are forty million immigrants in the United States.
If the GOP allows a fringe of irrational nativists and labor protectionists to paint it as an anti-immigrant party, it will hand the election to Barack Obama.

In answer to a previous reader’s question, here’s how a policy of giving green cards to foreigners who graduate American universities can reduce tuition:

Let’s say you have a state university which charges different rates for in-state and out of state tuition (as nearly all of them do.) Say it has 20,000 students, and needs to raise $200,000 million in tuition to pay its bills. Then, if all the students came from in-state, it would need to charge $10,000 per student.
But if the university lets in 5,000 foreign students, and charges then $20,000 each, it would raise $100 million that way, allowing it to cut the tuition on the 20,000 in-state students to $5,000 each to raise the remaining $100 million.
Of course, the university would now have to serve 25,000 students instead of 20,000 students, but most schools have vacant dorm rooms, and if not, could simply allow the excess students to rent rooms in town. This would help the local economy, and the university would reap further extra income from various fees, book store sales, cafeteria sales, etc.

The net result would be a 50 percent cut in tuition for the in-state students, while providing America with many more job-creating STEM graduates at no expense to the nation.

Furthermore, in order to counter this policy, foreign nations would be forced to raise their pay rates, which would improve the competitive position of American industry internationally.

In answer to an earlier reader who said that we don’t need foreign STEM graduates because we have a surplus of college graduates in the USA already:

People with college degrees, especially STEM degrees, are net job creators.
Of course not every engineering graduate is a job creator. Some of them may even be complete duds who can’t even work as an engineer, let alone create businesses that hire others.

But it order to produce the winners, you have to educate the lot. The more STEM graduates we have, the more job creators we will have, and the more jobs there will be, not only for STEM graduates, but for all the different kinds of people that the businesses they create will hire.

That is why it is of enormous benefit to keep the foreigners who graduate with STEM degrees from American universities, rather then give them away.

Furthermore, by offering such people green cards, we will force foreign countries to raise their pay rates, thereby enhancing the competitive position of American industry overall.

In addition, by competing for foreign talent in this way, we will undermine foreign tyrannies everywhere. For example, how long could China maintain its one-child policy if Chinese graduating from American universities had the option of staying here, where they could raise a family? Not long.

By keeping foreign STEM graduates out, we are undermining our economy while protecting foreign tyrannies from US competition.

“the GOP allows a fringe of irrational nativists and labor protectionists to paint it as an anti-immigrant party”

A fringe!
Irrational!
Nativists!
Labor Protectionists!

The Open Borders crowd shuts down all rational discussion and have been doing so for decades. From their dominant positions in the press, academia, and think tanks they vilify and marginalize immigration restrictionists. While the restrictionists debate with facts and logic the open borders amnesty crowd debates with mythology, name calling and character assassination.

Fact: America cannot hack it without immigrants. That’s always been true and it still is today.

You want to secure the border? Fine – seal it off.
But there are tens of millions of people already here.
Anyone who thinks you can deport them all is delusional.
How will you do it, in box cars? IMO, it would be more rational
and beneficial to get them into the stream as taxpayers & workers.

Not only that, because America’s schools are so bad, we need to draw the best talent from around the world as scientists, engineers, geneticists. America gets the benefit of the brain drain. To shut that off would be a perfect example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. It is absolutely ignorant.

Real estate market in a slump? Guess what, a lot of foreign investors would love to come to the US to buy property. Foreign investment is part of the solution to the US fiscal & economic problems.

Traditionally, it was the Democrat party that was anti-immigrant. I think the stupidest development of the last twenty years, has been the GOP becoming the nativist collective. Good luck with that.

Go on youtube and watch Reagan’s Farewell Address. He got it right. And today’s GOP is getting it exactly wrong.

As Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies noted that according to BLS numbers there are 101K American STEM workers who are looking for STEM jobs, 244K who have left the labor market and 1.47M who left the STEM fields. That’s 1.8M Americans with STEM degrees who do not have STEM jobs (and does not account for all of the many bright, knowledgeable, creative, industrious, experienced US citizen STEM workers who do not have STEM degrees).

BLS said at the beginning of the month that there were 13.4M unemployed and actively seeking work, 86.8M not in the labor force, 143M employed, 156.5M in the civilian labor force, 243M in the civilian, non-institutionalized population 16 and older. Based on historical employment/population ratios compared to today’s (65.3% for men, 52.7% for women), with some windage for voluntary vs. involuntary employment/population ratios (thus reaching a theoretical optimum of 81% e/p for men, 49.5% for women), I get a deficit of between 14M & 15M jobs.

They further estimate that 15.5% of the population is foreign born; in 2000 it was estimated at 10% (Alan Tonelson 2000 _The Race to the Bottom_ pg49); in 1960 it was 6% (Claudia Kolker 2011 _The Immigrant Advantage: What we can learn from new-comers to America about health, happiness, and hope_ pp10-11 and Stephen L. Klineberg 2005 _Public perceptions in Remarkable Times_); about 20% in 1890 (C.P. Kindleberger “Mass Migrations Then and Now” _Foreign Affairs_ vol43 #4 pp 647-658 andFranklin D. Scott 1968 _World Migration in Modern Times_ pg 147). “The share of non-U.S. citizens in the science and engineering work-force increased from 6% in 1994 to 12% in 2006.” (Titus Galama & James Hosek of RAND Corporation 2008 “US Competitiveness in Science and Technology” for US Department of Defense pg 22)

They reported nothing about how many able and willing US STEM workers are employed in survival jobs. If a former software architect is “employed” as a coffee server or taxi driver or pet-sitter, BLS considers him to be a fully-employed coffee server/taxi driver/pet-sitter, not as an under-employed software architect. They’ve never figured out a good way to measure such under-employment or mal-employment. The closest they’ve come is counting people in part-time jobs who would prefer full-time employment, and separate unemployment rates for those seeking part-time work and those seeking full-time work. Measures of bodyshopping (contingent, temporary, services, staffing, consulting, contracting… there are many euphemisms) have left a lot to be desired, as well..

For the last couple decades, quarterly BLS data show unemployment rates for STEM workers by detailed occupations have been running roughly 2 to 3 times earlier full employment levels, and that, once again, is rolling in foreign STEM workers resident in the USA and neglecting the many former STEM workers who are no longer employed as STEM workers. (Recent unemployment rates of 4.6% vs. a full employment level of 1.6% for architects and engineers; 3.6% vs. 1.1% for math & CS; roughly 5.7% vs. 1% for data-base administrators; 4% vs. 1% for physicists 2% to 6% vs. 1.1% for chemists; as compared to current unemployment rates of roughly 1.1% for lawyers, 1% for judges, and 24% to 50% for actors.)

The absurdity of this “we have too many STEM graduates already” argument can be seen by noting that if accepted, it would also argue for preventing additional native-born Americans from getting STEM degrees.

Not every STEM graduate starts a business. Not every STEM graduate makes an invention. Not every STEM graduate is employed in STEM fields, or employed at all. Not every STEM graduate is even employable.
But taken as a group, STEM graduates, on net, are a HUGE source of business growth, job creation, and technological progress.

A third of the firms started by Chinese-immigrant engineers in Silicon Valley, reported Jennifer Hunt, were in the business of PC wholesaling, involving no engineering, programming, just adding to commodity manufacturing. They were not advancing the science & technology envelope.

Professor Matloff of UC Davis recently reported that “former foreign students who have green cards or have become citizens (thus, in both cases, not exploitable) are earning significantly less than their U.S. native peers; the former foreign students obtain significantly fewer patents per capita than comparable U.S. natives; and the former foreign students are significantly less likely to be working in R&D than are the Americans”.

He also reminds us that in David North’s book he reported that the foreign PhD students in engineering were concentrated in the weaker U.S. schools; the lower the ranking of the university, the higher the proportion of international students. And an examination of USN&WR ratings showed a mean rating of 3.71 for the American students, versus 3.44 for the foreign students. Back to Matloff: “among the top 10 CS programs, the average percentage of foreign students was 45.7%, while among the botton 10 it was 66.5%”.

Now, those sub-par tech start-ups by immigrants? They employ Americans. Don’t they? Is employing Americans a good thing or not? How many do they employ? jgo & CIS don’t tell us. Maybe that’s because it hurts their argument. Maybe jgo & CIS want to shut down all those businesses and throw those Americans out of work.

Those lower tier universities jgo mentions — they employ Americans too. Don’t they? Would jgo & CIS be happier throwing all those Americans out of work along with the employees of those tech start-ups? I suspect they would.

The issue of Americans with STEM degrees who can’t find work is the one I like the best because it shows that the anti-immigrant movement is ultimately not politically conservative. It is a plea for more and bigger government at the national level. (Aunt Samantha* please protect us from these immigrants!)

Neither I nor jgo have even addressed the other kinds of small business start-ups by immigrants, the restaurants, the repair & body shops, the hotels, the REITS. The list goes on & on. Those businesses also employ Americans. Not only that, these people rent homes, buy cars, buy groceries, clothes. Eventually that money starts to add up. I suspect jgo & CIS don’t want Americans to be making that money. They’d be happier shutting down that part of the US economy.

Now one can argue the merits of Federal immigration policy. I personally don’t think the border policy is very good. Secure it. That’s fine with me. The sooner they do it, the better. And I don’t think undocumented immigrants should be eligible for public assistance either. So there. We agree on something. But jgo is addressing businesses and universities INSIDE the United States that employ a lot of Americans. What about those jobs?

And to me, that’s the important lesson to draw from jgo’s post. The anti-immigration ethos is not conservative. Basically, these people are begging for bigger government meddling in small business, financial and personal decisions. That’s what they want.

At one time, conservative Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan were pro-immigration. Today, anti-immigrant Republicans have become the pleaders for expanded police-state government at the national level.

I just did a little research, the people that founded those companies were mostly Americans. The truth is innovation and scientific breakthroughs in America have plummeted since the corrupt H-1b government program was juiced up. The H-1b is a corrupt big government program, that is a fact. Most of the companies that us it are Indian companies whom have bribed corrupt politicians to get what they want.